When playing the game last week we ran into two disagreements regarding these powers:

1). The Claw's game setup says not to place a negotiate on the sheet. The person playing this power argued that he could use one after switching the initial card. Even though its worded this way I feel the purpose of that instruction was to prevent negotiates from being played at all, since there is such an abundance of them.

2) My bro wanted to collect defender rewards for sending in the hired ships with the Merchant power. Even though the ships technically return to cards after the resolution, the majority decided that the nature of hired ships implies that the rewards would be given to the theoretical person the ships were hired from (and not my brother since he is getting rewards for his own ships).

I would appreciate your thoughts on these powers and our interpretations! Thanks in advance!

In my opinion...

1) The Claw
I feel that a Negotiate can't be used as the "Claw card" for a couple reasons. First, a negotiate is often a last-ditch effort (or an initial effort for Empath and Pacifist) for a player to get something good from an encounter, so they can't do that, because the Claw would take advantage of it. Second, my interpretation of "Choose one non-negotiate card from your starting hand to be your "claw"" means that every subsequent "claw" must fulfill the same requirement as the first claw card (no Negotiates), since each one is a "claw" and therefore bound by the same rules.

2) Merchant
As I recall, a winning defensive ally gets a reward for each ship that they had in the encounter. Based on the wording for the Merchant "These cards are treated as extra ships you have in the encounter", I feel it means that each hired ship counts as an extra ship for the Merchant player (so if they sent 4 ships normally plus 4 hired ships, the Merchant would get rewards as though they sent 8 ships).

The Claw can never use a negotiate as his claw.

Merchant does get rewards for his hired ships.